Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. – Helen Keller

What is this, The Highlander?

First off, immortality sounds pretty awful, not gonna lie. I mean, sure, if I get to look like Pam from True Blood, maybe I’ll be OK with living forever. But in general, it sounds pretty tedious. I’m looking forward to the fact that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I have no pretensions that I should be able to live longer, or even that I’m special enough to warrant any such arrangement.

But let’s consider for a second that there is a potion, and I’ve taken it. I’m living forever. What do I do now?

Since I can’t die, I’ll be a freak by normal standards. My first order of business will be figuring out how to live forever without attracting the kind of attention that gets you dissected in a lab. After that, the next big assignment will be to figure out how to make money and save it in a way that will continue to keep me funded for eternity (or at least the first couple hundred years). Once I’ve got my long-term survival mapped out, I can get to work on other endeavors.

My biggest goal will be to do good. Since I’m immortal, I can go into war zones and save children, or infiltrate terrorist cells and kill off the ringleaders, or whatever it is that needs doing that can most help.

But honestly, though I have the heart to help, I don’t have the intellect for it at the political level. So I’ll need companions that I can trust to remain true to the call. I’d search for a few more good people to become immortal and help with my mission. My friend Pete is one of the only people I know that I would trust not to fall to “the dark side” if he were to become immortal. I know that he would be trustworthy for the life of the mission, really cares about helping the world, and would be able to come up with some foolproof strategy. Together, we’d find a few more people to help complete our team, and go to work saving the world from itself.

Of course, while we’re fighting for good, we’d have to make the assumption that a few bad guys have also found and ingested the immortality potion. So now on top of helping the mortals, we’ll be fighting a hidden long-term battle with invincible baddies.

After a couple of hundred years of trying my hardest to help the common man rise above the general issues of being human, the fight with the evil immortals and the inevitability that normal humans will continue to screw themselves over and into alignment with the bad guys will eventually make me lose hope and forget what I’m fighting for. I’ll move to the Canadian wilderness and live off of the land, becoming friends with the local wildlife, if there’s any left. After a hundred years of living as a wild woman, I’ll come back to civilization to give it one more try, whereupon I’ll reconnect with my old friends and finally defeat the bad guys once and for all.

Then, if I’m lucky, the immortality potion will start to degrade in my bloodstream and I’ll become mortal again, just in time to fall madly in love with a mortal man, have a few kids, and die happily in old age in a peaceful world. The End.